Face-Off Between Strongmen Exposes Afghanistan’s Political Rifts

Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum. His portrait was removed from billboards by a rival, supporters say.CreditS. Sabawoon/European Pressphoto Agency

KABUL, Afghanistan — In northern Afghanistan, a dispute over billboard portraits of the country’s vice president has inflamed tensions between two of the most powerful regional strongmen, exposing internal political strains even as the government faces a dire challenge from Taliban offensives.

On Tuesday, hundreds of protesters marched in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh Province, expressing outrage that photos of Abdul Rashid Dostum, the vice president and a northern Uzbek factional leader, had been removed from two large billboards in the heart of the city.

The demonstrators blamed the province’s governor and Mr. Dostum’s longtime rival, Atta Mohammad Noor, saying that the men who took down the photos were using official police vehicles at a time of tight security for the celebration of the Persian New Year.

Mr. Noor, whose supporters also took to the streets, denied the accusations. Nevertheless, the posturing has raised fears of a return to the kind of open factional hostilities that, at their worst, drove the country’s disastrous civil war in the 1990s. Militias aligned with the two officials continued to intermittently battle each other until 2003, when the United Nations conducted a disarmament campaign and Mr. Noor consolidated his power as governor of Balkh Province and its lucrative resources.

A senior official close to President Ashraf Ghani, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the news media, said the president had sent a stern message to his vice president and the governor: If you are in the government, act like statesmen.

But some residents of Mazar-i-Sharif say they are on edge, and worried that the two factions will come to violence.

“All they care about is self-fame and personal interests and in between the poor people have to suffer,” Rahim Shah, 29, who sells curtains in Mazar-i-Sharif, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Shah said business was down on Tuesday and many shops had remained closed out of fear of violence. “My entire life, my hope, is tied to my shop. If anything happens to my shop, I will lose everything.”

It is not the first time that arguments over something as seemingly trivial as a photograph have threatened Afghanistan‘s coalition government, which was brokered by the United States after fraud-strewn elections in 2014.

Hard feelings left over from those elections — between the supporters of Mr. Ghani, who became president, and Abdullah Abdullah, for whom the position of the government’s chief executive was created — have kept the two sides tense over the smallest protocol issues. The strained relations have burdened a government faced with the mounting challenges of an emboldened insurgency and an economic crisis.

Nicholas Haysom, the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, recently listed the management of the “fractious and fragmented political elite” among Afghanistan’s top challenges, after security and the economy, if the government is to “simply survive” 2016.

The tensions in Balkh are the continuation of the political troubles stirred by the election. Mr. Noor, who was one of Mr. Abdullah’s main supporters, has said that his candidate was cheated out of winning and that the president’s team is now trying to marginalize Mr. Abdullah as well as replace Mr. Noor as governor of Balkh, a post he has held for 12 years.

Mr. Noor denied accusations that he was behind the removal of Mr. Dostum’s photos. In a long and at times harsh statement, he placed blame for the episode on “agitators” who he promised would be pursued. “We will not allow the security of our city to be ruined, or us and our people be cursed at, on pretext of the tearing of a photo,” he wrote.

Advisers to Mr. Dostum accused the governor of preventing the vice president’s supporters, who mostly originate from the neighboring provinces of Jowzjan, Sar-i-Pul and Faryab, from entering the city to organize a peaceful protest.

“The supporters of the vice president were not allowed into the city last night, and we asked them to retreat with calm and continue to seek justice in their home provinces,” said Bashir Ahmad Tayanj, a spokesman for Mr. Dostum’s National Islamic Movement Party of Afghanistan.

“The billboards were taken down by men using police vehicles,” Mr. Tayanj added. “This could not have happened by a couple thugs, it happened in coordination with the local authorities.”

Habibullah Kohmand, an adviser to Mr. Noor and the director of the Ministry of Mines in Balkh, said Mr. Dostum’s supporters had been prevented from entering because some of them were armed. “Those armed people intended to create chaos in the city so we had to stop them,” Mr. Kohmand said. “If they planned to hold a demonstration, why did they bring arms with them?”

Nevertheless, Mr. Noor’s own supporters, some also reported to have been armed, used the opportunity to show force, taking to the streets to drown out the protest that had been planned against him. Mr. Kohmand said thousands of supporters were on standby “to defend the governor’s position.” A war of words between the supporters of the two officials continues to flare on social media.

The two sides in the coalition government have bickered over seating arrangements for their respective leaders in public meetings, and the locations and sizes of their portraits in government offices.

This month, the proceedings of an International Women’s Day event attended by the country’s first lady, Rula Ghani, and cabinet ministers was delayed in part because there was a large portrait of Mr. Ghani behind the stage but not one of Mr. Abdullah.

After supporters demanded that the situation be fixed, a portrait of Mr. Abdullah was mounted on the other side of the stage. Because the new picture was notably smaller than Mr. Ghani’s, the organizers set up a screen next to the stage and projected a second, larger picture of Mr. Abdullah.

Mr. Ghani’s government has also faced pressure from an external political opposition that has been demanding that long-delayed parliamentary elections be held soon. The symbolism of pictures has come into play in that political dynamic as well.

As former President Hamid Karzai, who is believed to have supported Mr. Ghani’s campaign, and his allies have grown publicly disenchanted with his successor, visitors noticed that a large portrait of Mr. Ghani that was hanging in Mr. Karzai’s office was suddenly no longer there. Aides to Mr. Karzai said the portrait had been removed because of renovation. But when the picture reappeared, it was relegated to the waiting room.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Face-Off Between Strongmen Exposes Afghanistan’s Deep Political Rifts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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